11 ms·

Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

60 points by 80mph 4y ago

ramesh31 4y ago
Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean. The only crisis is in overpopulation, brought about by the tiered UC/CSU credentialism. Does anyone really think UCSC provides a better undergrad education than the average CSU? They literally have the exact same state mandated curriculum. But FAANG will hire someone with a UC degree over a CSU, thus the system is overflowing.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean Which is probably why so many people want to live there in the first place. Just like Vancouver or other such vibrant cities with great nature, pretty views and many amenities.
  - threads2 4y ago
    yeah, article sounds like my experience trying to rent in Kits a few years ago.
  - boringg 4y ago
    Santa Cruz is small. Vancouver is a large with significant land. Very different except they are both on the west coast.
    - aclatuts 4y ago
      A 4Ghz CPU is faster than a 1Ghz CPU. If you wanted to scale the best you would want faster algorithms and faster hardware. Not just faster hardware. Not being able to do something because of size for a human behaviour problem is almost always the smooth brain argument.
      - boringg 4y ago
        Your comparison is marginal at best. Effort for using smooth brain to strengthen your argument undermines any fleeting validity of your criticism.
- Dig1t 4y ago
  As someone who went to a CSU and works at a FAANG, I don't really agree about the credentialism thing, but I do agree about the overpopulation thing. The only real solution IMO is just to build more housing in California. For that to happen though, we need increased density which requires relaxed zoning, but NIMBY's want to preserve their city in its exact state forever, so we end up with this craziness.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    If only we had a rapid rail backbone so people could live further from these desirable cities without losing easy access to them.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but (a) Boomers aren't dying quickly enough and (b) we're talking about student housing. A litter fewer than 20k students attend UCSC: https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html Which suggests UCSC should either cut enrollment or build housing. They have suitable land for the latter. If they can't build housing due to legal restrictions, they could cut enrollment. Those are the realistic options.
- bena 4y ago
  That and the vampires
- millimeterman 4y ago
  There's nothing inherently impossible about building a dense, thriving city on "a tiny dot of land". I fail to see how the issue is overpopulation and not an abject failure to construct housing in line with the number of people who want to live there.
  - throw8383833jj 4y ago
    I've wondered about this myself, many many times. It's either a complete failure to understand the basic supply/demand equation which underpins all resource scarcity OR somehow voters feel it's in their interest to not change things.
    - millimeterman 4y ago
      > voters feel it's in their interest to not change things I mean, in a sense it is. NIMBY-dominated suburbia might be a disaster for the environment, economic growth, and the well-being of newer and poorer residents, but it does an excellent job of keeping homeowners' property values sky-high.
  - rcpt 4y ago
    Right. You could drop the center of Barcelona right on top Santa Cruz and have a vastly improved city.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is - certainly it would be a successful city if it were as dense as Paris, but it wouldn’t be Santa Cruz anymore, but Paris West or something.
    - millimeterman 4y ago
      > The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is There's no good reason that Santa Cruz should specifically stay the way it was 50 years ago or whatever. Personally, I would have liked for Santa Cruz to remain the way it was before people came and tore up all the nature to build a bunch of suburbs, but I can't get what I want either. Culture is inherently ever-changing; Santa Cruz may be _different_ in 50 years if densification and growth was allowed but I don't see how it would be somehow not be Santa Cruz. There are real, severe economic effects from trying to freeze a city in an arbitrary point in time. At some point the well-being of real actual people needs to be prioritized over the aesthetic preferences and property values of a few NIMBYs. Especially when those aesthetic preferences essentially boil down to hating multi-story apartments and public transit.
- borroka 4y ago
  Please. Just to give two examples, both Soquel Avenue and Lower Ocean have some of the ugliest buildings and lots in the history of architecture and urbanism. Why multi-story building can take their place? Aside from NIMBYsm and the incompetence of local administrators, the main problems for bigger and better urbanism in SC are water (apparently, then who knows) and transit. Regarding the latter, there are virtually no public transportation options between Santa Cruz-Aptos and Santa Cruz-San Jose. That is, there is only one bus. As someone who lived in SC for many years and for some inexplicable reason still lives there, what I can say is that the town could be 10 times more beautiful. I can't understand why the areas closest to the water have been "sold" to rich people instead of being used by the public, Mission Street (the main vehicular artery) is as ugly and dangerous as it can be for pedestrians and cyclists, West Cliff has been planted with ugly grass that you can't even tell if it's natural or turf-like, and the shoreline between the San Lorenzo River and the end of Seabright, man, it's so ugly, full of concrete, no trees, with rusting infrastructure that it's hard to believe nobody in ten+ years has done anything to make it decent-looking. Then, "A pretty white town that only looks somewhat Latino in the daytime because the service workers who keep this town running commute in from Watsonville and Salinas.", is a deeply misguided observation. The town itself is not pretty at all. Only looks somewhat Latino? I live in a neighborhood in Santa Cruz proper that is around, according to my visual estimate, 80% latino, and the 20% estimate for the whole town is fair (more than 30% at the county level).
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Sounds like looking for a place in Dublin/Berlin except instead of 24 applicant in 24 hours, a Berlin apartment gets like 200 applicants. Also in the Netherlands, several collage towns have students sleep in tents and container buildings or with university staff.
- lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19491247.2022.2059844 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19491247.2022.2... Relevant: Supply side effects of the Berlin rent freeze Abstract - We find rent decreases accompanied by decreases in supply five times as large. We further investigate spillover effects on the purchase market, regionally heterogeneous effects as well as different effects by dwelling characteristics. We find the rent freeze did not have spillover effects on dwellings for sale which point to a ‘wait-and-see-attitude’ on the investors’ side. We make use of a rich dataset of real estate advertisements and employ hedonic difference-in-difference and triple-difference estimation strategies.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    > We find rent decreases accompanied by decreases in supply five times as large. If you want something completely FUBAR, you can always trust your local German bureaucrats to do a good job at it, especially in Berlin. I wonder why they haven't tried increasing building supply and limiting external illegal immigration first? Also, why haven't they tried preventing these tax dodging stock market listed real estate mega conglomerates from owing a large proportion of the housing stock, as for them it's an investment for rent seeking that must make a return for their shareholders, rather than just shelter for someone. Crazy that Germans/Berliners let this happened yet see no issue with this and instead though that artificially capping rents was somehow magically gonna fix this. I guess most citizens don't really grasp the function of the housing market or the economics of it and instead will just vote for a quick handout. "Give them bread and games."
    - llampx 4y ago
      Exactly. People actually argue against increasing housing stock, or building new apartment. They say only new luxury apartments are being built. What do they want, that the builders build old rickety apartments with standards from the 1960s? Any apartment with decent construction is lambasted as being luxury, when a large part of the standards comes from the government itself - they would not give a permit for an apartment to be constructed to 1960 standards in terms of energy efficiency and insulation, windows etc. When the government is extremely picky about how many permits to give, it is no surprise that only expensive apartments are built first.
boringg 4y ago
The thing I read in there that was disappointing was the administration response. However it is a state school so I imagine they don't have the same funding for development of housing on site / not to mention they are located between the SC mountains / protected forest and the ocean. It's a small area without much development space and that land is at a premium. Feel for the students though.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  For a long time now, the UC system's spirit has been "hey, our total lack of concern about our students' well-being is feature, not a bug. If you graduate here, you've shown you're a survivor (or that you have money to soften the blows)". I felt that ethos at UC Berkeley forty years ago. And sure, if UC solved the housing problem for their students, it might solve things for non-students, which might reduce house values and no one wants housing prices to decline.
  - boringg 4y ago
    I don't think improving housing for UC students solves the problem for the area. I was just referring to them building more on campus housing. Might take a bit of heat off the rental market. The turn in the story is ... let's revisit this next year and see how the housing situation is .. I think it's about to melt down a lot. I suspect this blog post represents an unfortunate temporary thing.
rcpt 4y ago
Such a great place to live except for the people. Long time Santa Cruz residents have zero shame about telling latecomers to get out. And then there's this https://www.surfertoday.com/surf-movies/the-westsiders https://www.surfertoday.com/surf-movies/the-westsiders Anyway, end Prop 13 now.
- 50 4y ago
  It is situated in such a beautiful place. I fondly remember the surf, the woods, the jazz club, and the anarchist literary scene. It's really a shame about the lack of diversity and the racist, anti-homeless natives/long-term residents. I left after having a couple fascist landlords.
michaelwww 4y ago
Santa Cruz native here: I can understand the author's frustrations coming to Santa Cruz from the outside but there's more to it. He's describing a UCSC problem because the university is expanding without building enough dormitories and relying on development in the city instead. This is causing unrest among the natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city. The second problem is Santa Cruz by the sea is a very desirable place to live and within commuting distance from Silicon Valley, so wealthy tech workers can buy up or build very expensive first or second homes here. However, Santa Cruz since the 70's has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city that recognized that San Jose style growth would ruin the city. This means demand far outstrips supply. With the lack of supply, natives and others who work in services and support Santa Cruz's biggest industry (tourism) can't afford to live here. It's a dark joke among family and friends that once you leave Santa Cruz you can never afford to move back. I have family that have moved away and the next generation like my kids and nieces and nephews will never be able to afford to buy a house there like my father did. Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services Lastly, long time Santa Cruz residents are generally are not sympathetic to complaints from students that come here from the outside, because they consider UCSC to be a big part of the problem. People considering UCSC would be advised to secure housing beforehand or choose another university. I hear they opened a new nice one in Merced, which has more affordable housing.
- rcpt 4y ago
  > very environmentally conscious no-growth city > growth would ruin the city So I take it you'll be doing your part and packing your bags?
  - zeruch 4y ago
    Given he stated he was a native, why would he (your pedantry aside)?
    - rcpt 4y ago
      For the environment, and to not "ruin the city". Or is your belief that the city was the exact perfect size when his bloodline moved in and it's only people who showed up later that are undeserving?
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wikitopian 4y ago
California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > aesthetic Most people find European cities more beautiful. SC is an ugly city. Even SF is much more pretty. > ecological It’s pretty well established that cities are ecological superior to suburbs. > socioeconomic Money extracted from the economy by landlords is money not flowing and being used to spur economic activity. VC firms have lamented that they have to invest in bigger rounds because growing headcount in expensive-rent cities is their greatest expense.
  - nradov 4y ago
    People don't choose to live in cities like Santa Cruz for the architecture. That's kind of missing the point. No one cares what the buildings look like. Noted VC Peter Thiel reduced his investments in the SF Bay Area because housing got too expensive. Most of the funding just flows to landlords. https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter-thiel-silicon-valley-capital-landlords-12759450.php https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...
    - bombcar 4y ago
      So repeal prop 13 for non-owner occupied properties, and tax rental income at insane amounts.
      - millimeterman 4y ago
        You are effectively just proposing an enormous tax (read: price increase) on renters, which seems like the exact opposite of what needs to be achieved. I would support completely repealing prop 13 though. Demonizing landlords, developers, and property investment firms at best does nothing and at worst actively makes the housing situation worse by further restricting supply. No amount of disincentives to property ownership will solve the core, fundamental problem that _there is not enough housing_. Any solution that doesn't increase supply is no solution at all.
alistairSH 4y ago
Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC? It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house. At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).
- foogazi 4y ago
  UCSC sits on 2,000 acres Unconscionable that they off-load student housing onto the city of Santa Cruz Gavin Newsom should lead by example and guarantee that no UC student will go homeless
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    Looking at the satellite view in Google Maps, there appears to be massive plots of open space dead center on campus and also to the east? And the entire campus is far less dense than UVA (for whatever that's worth - another small city campus that's extremely picturesque albeit for different reasons). 60% of UVA students live off-campus, but there doesn't seem to be the same problem with obtaining it. Prices are higher than you'd expect in a non-college town, because it's a captive market.
    - foogazi 4y ago
      There are cow pastures right on campus They have tried building more, but I think someone found an endangered frog or bird living on a creek by the new development site
  - newaccount2021 4y ago
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Plenty of students want to live off campus, as adults, instead of being on campus. It’s unconscionable that the city would be so un-accommodating to students while exploiting them for rent money and economic gain.
uup 4y ago
There really is a lot of truth in Mark Twain's old adage: "Buy land, they're not making it anymore." I think there is a certain amount of delusion in expecting any static resource to meet monotonically increasing amounts of demand.
- paxys 4y ago
  It will be a very, very long time before we run out of usable land in this country. The problem really is that 50% of the population wants to live on the same 0.1% of land.
  - uup 4y ago
    The saying can apply to any arbitrary area of land. It doesn't necessarily mean the entire Earth.
- millimeterman 4y ago
  Ever since humanity started being able to build upward, I'm not sure this is so relevant. There's more than enough developed land to comfortably house the human race. We're just using it comically inefficiently.
  - uup 4y ago
    Let's saying the average human values shelter at $X. Even if it were always possible to arbitrarily build upwards, it still makes sense to buy land because the value of the land would be $X * number of people who want to live on the land. As long as the number of people who want to live on your land keeps growing, as seems to be the case in Santa Cruz, it makes sense to own land. And of course, once you own the land, you may decide that maybe you don't want so many people around. The value of your land is based on desirability, not the actual density, after all. So instead of building an arbitrarily tall building, you band together with the other land owners and implement something called zoning that restricts how high buildings can be. I'm not making a moral claim that this is right or wrong. I'm simply pointing out that this incentive structure is inherent to land ownership in our country.
Tr3nton 4y ago
standardUser 4y ago
What people seem to miss is how awesome UCSC is. In typical HN fashion I see multiple comments talking dryly about college selection like it's a business decision. People flock to UCSC for its exceptional natural beauty, idiosyncratic culture and slightly unorthodox academics. Not because of a cost-benefit analysis. For people like me, it offered a big-campus college experience without the emphasis on sports and the Greek system. And it offered it in a culturally bizarre and incredibly beautiful corner of the country. That draw isn't going away anytime soon, especially since students can subsidize those crazy-high rents with student debt as I once did.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  This is the campus: https://www.ucsc.edu/campus/colleges.html https://www.ucsc.edu/campus/colleges.html Beautiful, idyllic, all that. All of HN would love to live there and 98% of them would probably join all the UCSC admin/students/alumni masses in fighting new housing on the campus the day they got there, or at least when the jackhammers started during their study period. And then they'd blame the city for not having more housing for those not lucky enough.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Sure, I'd blame the city for not building a series of 100 story apartment buildings and not connecting them to San Jose and San Francisco by monorail - or least for not extending BART to San Jose forty years and thus not extending it to Santa Cruz twenty years ago. Also for not giving me a flying car. I mean, some portion of hn readers are technological optimists still in starry days of imagining massively productive technology would vast dividends for humankind. And why shouldn't they be. The world of today where progress somehow becomes the reason the average person gets less is fricken miserable and I make no excuses for not imagining it as normal.
- paxys 4y ago
  That's the issue isn't it? Students flock to it not after doing a cost-benefit analysis but because it's an upscale seaside resort where they can have a great time for four years. But then why complain about the cost of living there? Should it be affordable? And should the town have to support this?
foogazi 4y ago
When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ? As a techie, Santa Cruz renter and UCSC parent, I sympathize with the author But living here and going to school here are choices, UC Davis, Merced & Berkeley exist I’m sure someone can complain that I outbid them to rent a house But driving up from Berkeley, seeing the housing issue, the homeless problem, and then saying “this sucks, but make room for me” strikes me as naive
- millimeterman 4y ago
  > When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ? Why should the growth stop? People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. I see no reason why NIMBYs should be allowed to artificially decide that newcomers are not allowed. Growth will simply continue as long as people keep moving in.
  - foogazi 4y ago
    > People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. Yes, they demonstrate a desire to move into these cities in their current non-hypergrowth form Then you follow up and make that desire a reality by putting a down payment on a property Talk is cheap
    - millimeterman 4y ago
      I think humans have demonstrated time and time again that densely constructed cities are a desirable place to live. Are there some people that would leave if these cities started loosening zoning and allowing dense construction? Sure - not everyone wants to live in a big city. But I would argue that the net change in population would still be massively positive. Besides, why should existing homeowners get a monopoly on deciding what kind of city Santa Cruz should be? If there is a desire for dense housing, then dense housing will get filled. If you're right that people moving to these cities want suburbia then one would expect new multi-story apartments to go empty. But that's clearly not what happens.
- RhysU 4y ago
  > What’s the end-game? Step 1: Move somewhere affordable. Step 2: Spend years building an awesome community because you personally endeavor to make it what you want. Step 3: Profit. Notice this is the same process for a fixer upper house. It's just a buying into a fixer upper community. Labor intensive. Higher variability in the outcome but notice much more upside than flipping houses.
yuan43 4y ago
The recipe for what Santa Cruz is experiencing seems to be: 1. Locate the city in a geographically isolated, but beautiful area close to a major employment hub. 2. Institute strong anti-growth policies. 3. Invite a UC into town. 4. Allow the UC to expand without the matching requirement to build one market-rate housing unit per admitted student. 5. Wait a few decades. What's great about this is how everyone is trying to get something for nothing. The students are trying to get a "UC" brand without the highly-selective entry requirements of other UCs, and largely bringing in loans to pay for it. The university is growing the student population without building sufficient student housing. Property owners benefit from skyrocketing values without experiencing the pain of finding a place to live, or proportionally exploding property taxes. The city benefits from the money the students bring with them in the form of debt. I suspect this process would go into reverse rather quickly by taking a single step. Cut the federal loans program by 50%, then 10% per year for every year thereafter. For extra bang, repeal Proposition 13.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I mostly agree with your sentiment, but I don’t think you’re being very fair to students, and i don’t think this issue is particularly about the students. (and I’m not convinced Prop13 needs to be repealed to solve problems). Students and loans are a different issue and it seems cruel to label them as wannabe UC students who aren’t good enough. All UCs are respectable. I think this issue can be generalized a lot… 1. Locate a city with geographic limits. 2. Institute anti-growth policies. 3. Invite anything that may attract more people into town. 4. Allow 3 to continue/repeat without an increase in market rate housing. 5. Wait. 6. Landlords profit Prop 13 has a good goal - prevent property tax increases from displacing long term residents. If you allow growth in housing supply then this can be a good thing, but the incentives ruin it. A balanced law or requirement that requires more housing to maintain prop13 would likely solve this mismatched incentive issue (if you vote against more housing, you could experience cost increases). Maybe tack a “breakpoint” in tax stability to rent-rates-beyond-inflation stability.
  - rcpt 4y ago
    Since 1977 California has had the California Tax Postponement Program to protect low income seniors from the economy. If you're a low income senior and own your house in California you can defer property taxes indefinitely so that no matter what happens to housing prices you'll never feel pressured to move. Several states have something similar (eg. NJ senior freeze) but I think California is the most aggressive. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary. It could be removed entirely overnight and grandma wouldn't need to pay a dime.
paxys 4y ago
Sad to say but the only way to get administration to take these issues seriously is to transfer out. Santa Cruz is the bottom feeder of the UC system. The only reason people take it seriously is because of the prestigious "University of California" tag. There are plenty of better schools nearby (including non-UC ones like Cal Poly and several CSUs) that are more worth your money. Or think even beyond that. I went to a top 10 school in the midwest and paid $300/mo for my own apartment. After graduating I got a job working next to people from Berkeley, MIT and Stanford with the same career trajectory as them but a tiny fraction of the debt.
- llampx 4y ago
  Standard reminder that institutional problems can not be fixed by individual action.
btbuilder 4y ago
Unless housing is built and controlled by UCSC the housing will be snapped up by more of the same and not change the equation that much IMO. If growth is wanted and accepted by the majority of voters (which I don’t believe it is) then a unified plan that involves significant transport investment is needed. Traffic on highway 1 in both directions or mission street are clear indications of this. I believe the university should be making sure it’s students are fully aware of the situation. Especially new foreign students who have no credit or even guarantors to fall back on for private rentals.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The state should sit on the UC system and forbid them to allow more students to attend than they can provide housing for.
russellbeattie 4y ago
My son just went through this and got super lucky to find a place, but out in Capitola. UCSC's campus is absolutely massive with huge areas of unused, unforested land [1]. There is more than enough space for more dorms and apartment houses as well as the accompanying utility systems needed. If they're going to continue to increase enrollment, they need to bite the bullet and put up some goddamn buildings. They simply don't want to. 1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/qocsUGwbhcZaKbdX7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/qocsUGwbhcZaKbdX7
- jltsiren 4y ago
  The university wants to build new student housing, but many people in the university and many locals don't. There are concrete plans to build housing for a few thousand additional students on campus, but the plans have been on hold for years as people oppose them for environmental and aesthetic reasons.
  - russellbeattie 4y ago
    I think we both know how many legal and political levers can be brought to bear by large government institutions when they wish. This is a priority and the NIMBYs in this case are being absurd. In the 1950s Santa Cruz actively campaigned to have the campus there with widespread support from residents. They signed up for it and that huge chunk of land was granted with the idea of having plenty of space to have all the students on campus, and for future growth. The residents were repaid by the skyrocketing values of their homes. The current residents either grew up with that knowledge, or chose to move there despite it. The city can't just decide 60 years into its existence that they've changed their minds and want to limit the university's growth. That's what the plan was from the beginning. Anyways, when the UC finally decides it has to be done, Santa Cruz will have little power to stop them short of an outright legal war. Like I said, they simply don't want to.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > The university wants to build new student housing, but many people in the university and many locals don't. UC is an independent entity from the city and they can build housing on their plentiful land whether locals like it or not. UCSC just doesn't want to solve the problem and prefers to look the other way and dump the students onto a town that has no space.
johnea 4y ago
So, I have to agree there is a major shortage of affordable housing. But, I have to disagree that this is due to a lack of building. 20 years ago, there was no housing crisis. Period. In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%? No, of course it didn't. In fact the US population is very flat in recent decades. What changed? Short term rental!!! A huge portion of the housing stock purchased, much by corporate buyers, and converted to AirBnB or VRBO. The housing crisis is 100% created by the rise of "short term rentals", a phrase that really means: "convert a significant portion of the housing stock into unlicensed hotels". People paying per night to rent houses are never going to be out-bid by people who want to rent by the month. This whole BS about "not building enough", is really "not building enough to make up for all the houses now run as hotels". There has NOT been a population boom. Ask yourself: Why were there enough houses a decade or 2 ago, but not now?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Population went from 289 million to 329 million. That’s not nothing.
- fragmede 4y ago
  > In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%? I hate to break it to you, but let's say the population grew a measly 1% per year. Thanks to the way compounding interest grows, after 20 years, that is about a 20% increase compared to 20 years ago. (1.01^20 = 1.22)
- millimeterman 4y ago
  While some comments have pointed out that the population has increased, that doesn't actually matter. Because what's being discussed here is an increase in demand for housing in a specific city. Even if the country's population stayed the same, an increase of people wanting to move to Santa Cruz will drive up demand for housing in Santa Cruz. When you have sustained increases in demand over multiple decades but local governments that block any and all attempts at constructing housing supply to match, you get the ballooning prices you see now. That there is plenty of housing supply in Nowheresville, Nebraska is of little use to the people who can't afford to live in Santa Cruz.

60 points by 80mph 4y ago

Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean. The only crisis is in overpopulation, brought about by the tiered UC/CSU credentialism. Does anyone really think UCSC provides a better undergrad education than the average CSU? They literally have the exact same state mandated curriculum. But FAANG will hire someone with a UC degree over a CSU, thus the system is overflowing.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean Which is probably why so many people want to live there in the first place. Just like Vancouver or other such vibrant cities with great nature, pretty views and many amenities.
- threads2 4y ago
  yeah, article sounds like my experience trying to rent in Kits a few years ago.
- boringg 4y ago
  Santa Cruz is small. Vancouver is a large with significant land. Very different except they are both on the west coast.
  - aclatuts 4y ago
    A 4Ghz CPU is faster than a 1Ghz CPU. If you wanted to scale the best you would want faster algorithms and faster hardware. Not just faster hardware. Not being able to do something because of size for a human behaviour problem is almost always the smooth brain argument.
    - boringg 4y ago
      Your comparison is marginal at best. Effort for using smooth brain to strengthen your argument undermines any fleeting validity of your criticism.
Dig1t 4y ago
As someone who went to a CSU and works at a FAANG, I don't really agree about the credentialism thing, but I do agree about the overpopulation thing. The only real solution IMO is just to build more housing in California. For that to happen though, we need increased density which requires relaxed zoning, but NIMBY's want to preserve their city in its exact state forever, so we end up with this craziness.
- bombcar 4y ago
  If only we had a rapid rail backbone so people could live further from these desirable cities without losing easy access to them.
KerrAvon 4y ago
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but (a) Boomers aren't dying quickly enough and (b) we're talking about student housing. A litter fewer than 20k students attend UCSC: https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html Which suggests UCSC should either cut enrollment or build housing. They have suitable land for the latter. If they can't build housing due to legal restrictions, they could cut enrollment. Those are the realistic options.
bena 4y ago
That and the vampires
millimeterman 4y ago
There's nothing inherently impossible about building a dense, thriving city on "a tiny dot of land". I fail to see how the issue is overpopulation and not an abject failure to construct housing in line with the number of people who want to live there.
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  I've wondered about this myself, many many times. It's either a complete failure to understand the basic supply/demand equation which underpins all resource scarcity OR somehow voters feel it's in their interest to not change things.
  - millimeterman 4y ago
    > voters feel it's in their interest to not change things I mean, in a sense it is. NIMBY-dominated suburbia might be a disaster for the environment, economic growth, and the well-being of newer and poorer residents, but it does an excellent job of keeping homeowners' property values sky-high.
- rcpt 4y ago
  Right. You could drop the center of Barcelona right on top Santa Cruz and have a vastly improved city.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is - certainly it would be a successful city if it were as dense as Paris, but it wouldn’t be Santa Cruz anymore, but Paris West or something.
  - millimeterman 4y ago
    > The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is There's no good reason that Santa Cruz should specifically stay the way it was 50 years ago or whatever. Personally, I would have liked for Santa Cruz to remain the way it was before people came and tore up all the nature to build a bunch of suburbs, but I can't get what I want either. Culture is inherently ever-changing; Santa Cruz may be _different_ in 50 years if densification and growth was allowed but I don't see how it would be somehow not be Santa Cruz. There are real, severe economic effects from trying to freeze a city in an arbitrary point in time. At some point the well-being of real actual people needs to be prioritized over the aesthetic preferences and property values of a few NIMBYs. Especially when those aesthetic preferences essentially boil down to hating multi-story apartments and public transit.
borroka 4y ago
Please. Just to give two examples, both Soquel Avenue and Lower Ocean have some of the ugliest buildings and lots in the history of architecture and urbanism. Why multi-story building can take their place? Aside from NIMBYsm and the incompetence of local administrators, the main problems for bigger and better urbanism in SC are water (apparently, then who knows) and transit. Regarding the latter, there are virtually no public transportation options between Santa Cruz-Aptos and Santa Cruz-San Jose. That is, there is only one bus. As someone who lived in SC for many years and for some inexplicable reason still lives there, what I can say is that the town could be 10 times more beautiful. I can't understand why the areas closest to the water have been "sold" to rich people instead of being used by the public, Mission Street (the main vehicular artery) is as ugly and dangerous as it can be for pedestrians and cyclists, West Cliff has been planted with ugly grass that you can't even tell if it's natural or turf-like, and the shoreline between the San Lorenzo River and the end of Seabright, man, it's so ugly, full of concrete, no trees, with rusting infrastructure that it's hard to believe nobody in ten+ years has done anything to make it decent-looking. Then, "A pretty white town that only looks somewhat Latino in the daytime because the service workers who keep this town running commute in from Watsonville and Salinas.", is a deeply misguided observation. The town itself is not pretty at all. Only looks somewhat Latino? I live in a neighborhood in Santa Cruz proper that is around, according to my visual estimate, 80% latino, and the 20% estimate for the whole town is fair (more than 30% at the county level).

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

Sounds like looking for a place in Dublin/Berlin except instead of 24 applicant in 24 hours, a Berlin apartment gets like 200 applicants. Also in the Netherlands, several collage towns have students sleep in tents and container buildings or with university staff.

lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19491247.2022.2059844 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19491247.2022.2... Relevant: Supply side effects of the Berlin rent freeze Abstract - We find rent decreases accompanied by decreases in supply five times as large. We further investigate spillover effects on the purchase market, regionally heterogeneous effects as well as different effects by dwelling characteristics. We find the rent freeze did not have spillover effects on dwellings for sale which point to a ‘wait-and-see-attitude’ on the investors’ side. We make use of a rich dataset of real estate advertisements and employ hedonic difference-in-difference and triple-difference estimation strategies.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  > We find rent decreases accompanied by decreases in supply five times as large. If you want something completely FUBAR, you can always trust your local German bureaucrats to do a good job at it, especially in Berlin. I wonder why they haven't tried increasing building supply and limiting external illegal immigration first? Also, why haven't they tried preventing these tax dodging stock market listed real estate mega conglomerates from owing a large proportion of the housing stock, as for them it's an investment for rent seeking that must make a return for their shareholders, rather than just shelter for someone. Crazy that Germans/Berliners let this happened yet see no issue with this and instead though that artificially capping rents was somehow magically gonna fix this. I guess most citizens don't really grasp the function of the housing market or the economics of it and instead will just vote for a quick handout. "Give them bread and games."
  - llampx 4y ago
    Exactly. People actually argue against increasing housing stock, or building new apartment. They say only new luxury apartments are being built. What do they want, that the builders build old rickety apartments with standards from the 1960s? Any apartment with decent construction is lambasted as being luxury, when a large part of the standards comes from the government itself - they would not give a permit for an apartment to be constructed to 1960 standards in terms of energy efficiency and insulation, windows etc. When the government is extremely picky about how many permits to give, it is no surprise that only expensive apartments are built first.

boringg 4y ago

The thing I read in there that was disappointing was the administration response. However it is a state school so I imagine they don't have the same funding for development of housing on site / not to mention they are located between the SC mountains / protected forest and the ocean. It's a small area without much development space and that land is at a premium. Feel for the students though.

joe_the_user 4y ago
For a long time now, the UC system's spirit has been "hey, our total lack of concern about our students' well-being is feature, not a bug. If you graduate here, you've shown you're a survivor (or that you have money to soften the blows)". I felt that ethos at UC Berkeley forty years ago. And sure, if UC solved the housing problem for their students, it might solve things for non-students, which might reduce house values and no one wants housing prices to decline.
- boringg 4y ago
  I don't think improving housing for UC students solves the problem for the area. I was just referring to them building more on campus housing. Might take a bit of heat off the rental market. The turn in the story is ... let's revisit this next year and see how the housing situation is .. I think it's about to melt down a lot. I suspect this blog post represents an unfortunate temporary thing.

rcpt 4y ago

Such a great place to live except for the people. Long time Santa Cruz residents have zero shame about telling latecomers to get out. And then there's this https://www.surfertoday.com/surf-movies/the-westsiders https://www.surfertoday.com/surf-movies/the-westsiders Anyway, end Prop 13 now.

50 4y ago
It is situated in such a beautiful place. I fondly remember the surf, the woods, the jazz club, and the anarchist literary scene. It's really a shame about the lack of diversity and the racist, anti-homeless natives/long-term residents. I left after having a couple fascist landlords.

michaelwww 4y ago

Santa Cruz native here: I can understand the author's frustrations coming to Santa Cruz from the outside but there's more to it. He's describing a UCSC problem because the university is expanding without building enough dormitories and relying on development in the city instead. This is causing unrest among the natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city. The second problem is Santa Cruz by the sea is a very desirable place to live and within commuting distance from Silicon Valley, so wealthy tech workers can buy up or build very expensive first or second homes here. However, Santa Cruz since the 70's has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city that recognized that San Jose style growth would ruin the city. This means demand far outstrips supply. With the lack of supply, natives and others who work in services and support Santa Cruz's biggest industry (tourism) can't afford to live here. It's a dark joke among family and friends that once you leave Santa Cruz you can never afford to move back. I have family that have moved away and the next generation like my kids and nieces and nephews will never be able to afford to buy a house there like my father did. Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services Lastly, long time Santa Cruz residents are generally are not sympathetic to complaints from students that come here from the outside, because they consider UCSC to be a big part of the problem. People considering UCSC would be advised to secure housing beforehand or choose another university. I hear they opened a new nice one in Merced, which has more affordable housing.

rcpt 4y ago
> very environmentally conscious no-growth city > growth would ruin the city So I take it you'll be doing your part and packing your bags?
- zeruch 4y ago
  Given he stated he was a native, why would he (your pedantry aside)?
  - rcpt 4y ago
    For the environment, and to not "ruin the city". Or is your belief that the city was the exact perfect size when his bloodline moved in and it's only people who showed up later that are undeserving?

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wikitopian 4y ago

California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> aesthetic Most people find European cities more beautiful. SC is an ugly city. Even SF is much more pretty. > ecological It’s pretty well established that cities are ecological superior to suburbs. > socioeconomic Money extracted from the economy by landlords is money not flowing and being used to spur economic activity. VC firms have lamented that they have to invest in bigger rounds because growing headcount in expensive-rent cities is their greatest expense.
- nradov 4y ago
  People don't choose to live in cities like Santa Cruz for the architecture. That's kind of missing the point. No one cares what the buildings look like. Noted VC Peter Thiel reduced his investments in the SF Bay Area because housing got too expensive. Most of the funding just flows to landlords. https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter-thiel-silicon-valley-capital-landlords-12759450.php https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    So repeal prop 13 for non-owner occupied properties, and tax rental income at insane amounts.
    - millimeterman 4y ago
      You are effectively just proposing an enormous tax (read: price increase) on renters, which seems like the exact opposite of what needs to be achieved. I would support completely repealing prop 13 though. Demonizing landlords, developers, and property investment firms at best does nothing and at worst actively makes the housing situation worse by further restricting supply. No amount of disincentives to property ownership will solve the core, fundamental problem that _there is not enough housing_. Any solution that doesn't increase supply is no solution at all.

alistairSH 4y ago

Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC? It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house. At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).

foogazi 4y ago
UCSC sits on 2,000 acres Unconscionable that they off-load student housing onto the city of Santa Cruz Gavin Newsom should lead by example and guarantee that no UC student will go homeless
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Looking at the satellite view in Google Maps, there appears to be massive plots of open space dead center on campus and also to the east? And the entire campus is far less dense than UVA (for whatever that's worth - another small city campus that's extremely picturesque albeit for different reasons). 60% of UVA students live off-campus, but there doesn't seem to be the same problem with obtaining it. Prices are higher than you'd expect in a non-college town, because it's a captive market.
  - foogazi 4y ago
    There are cow pastures right on campus They have tried building more, but I think someone found an endangered frog or bird living on a creek by the new development site
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Plenty of students want to live off campus, as adults, instead of being on campus. It’s unconscionable that the city would be so un-accommodating to students while exploiting them for rent money and economic gain.

uup 4y ago

There really is a lot of truth in Mark Twain's old adage: "Buy land, they're not making it anymore." I think there is a certain amount of delusion in expecting any static resource to meet monotonically increasing amounts of demand.

paxys 4y ago
It will be a very, very long time before we run out of usable land in this country. The problem really is that 50% of the population wants to live on the same 0.1% of land.
- uup 4y ago
  The saying can apply to any arbitrary area of land. It doesn't necessarily mean the entire Earth.
millimeterman 4y ago
Ever since humanity started being able to build upward, I'm not sure this is so relevant. There's more than enough developed land to comfortably house the human race. We're just using it comically inefficiently.
- uup 4y ago
  Let's saying the average human values shelter at $X. Even if it were always possible to arbitrarily build upwards, it still makes sense to buy land because the value of the land would be $X * number of people who want to live on the land. As long as the number of people who want to live on your land keeps growing, as seems to be the case in Santa Cruz, it makes sense to own land. And of course, once you own the land, you may decide that maybe you don't want so many people around. The value of your land is based on desirability, not the actual density, after all. So instead of building an arbitrarily tall building, you band together with the other land owners and implement something called zoning that restricts how high buildings can be. I'm not making a moral claim that this is right or wrong. I'm simply pointing out that this incentive structure is inherent to land ownership in our country.

Tr3nton 4y ago

standardUser 4y ago

What people seem to miss is how awesome UCSC is. In typical HN fashion I see multiple comments talking dryly about college selection like it's a business decision. People flock to UCSC for its exceptional natural beauty, idiosyncratic culture and slightly unorthodox academics. Not because of a cost-benefit analysis. For people like me, it offered a big-campus college experience without the emphasis on sports and the Greek system. And it offered it in a culturally bizarre and incredibly beautiful corner of the country. That draw isn't going away anytime soon, especially since students can subsidize those crazy-high rents with student debt as I once did.

hindsightbias 4y ago
This is the campus: https://www.ucsc.edu/campus/colleges.html https://www.ucsc.edu/campus/colleges.html Beautiful, idyllic, all that. All of HN would love to live there and 98% of them would probably join all the UCSC admin/students/alumni masses in fighting new housing on the campus the day they got there, or at least when the jackhammers started during their study period. And then they'd blame the city for not having more housing for those not lucky enough.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Sure, I'd blame the city for not building a series of 100 story apartment buildings and not connecting them to San Jose and San Francisco by monorail - or least for not extending BART to San Jose forty years and thus not extending it to Santa Cruz twenty years ago. Also for not giving me a flying car. I mean, some portion of hn readers are technological optimists still in starry days of imagining massively productive technology would vast dividends for humankind. And why shouldn't they be. The world of today where progress somehow becomes the reason the average person gets less is fricken miserable and I make no excuses for not imagining it as normal.
paxys 4y ago
That's the issue isn't it? Students flock to it not after doing a cost-benefit analysis but because it's an upscale seaside resort where they can have a great time for four years. But then why complain about the cost of living there? Should it be affordable? And should the town have to support this?

foogazi 4y ago

When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ? As a techie, Santa Cruz renter and UCSC parent, I sympathize with the author But living here and going to school here are choices, UC Davis, Merced & Berkeley exist I’m sure someone can complain that I outbid them to rent a house But driving up from Berkeley, seeing the housing issue, the homeless problem, and then saying “this sucks, but make room for me” strikes me as naive

millimeterman 4y ago
> When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ? Why should the growth stop? People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. I see no reason why NIMBYs should be allowed to artificially decide that newcomers are not allowed. Growth will simply continue as long as people keep moving in.
- foogazi 4y ago
  > People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. Yes, they demonstrate a desire to move into these cities in their current non-hypergrowth form Then you follow up and make that desire a reality by putting a down payment on a property Talk is cheap
  - millimeterman 4y ago
    I think humans have demonstrated time and time again that densely constructed cities are a desirable place to live. Are there some people that would leave if these cities started loosening zoning and allowing dense construction? Sure - not everyone wants to live in a big city. But I would argue that the net change in population would still be massively positive. Besides, why should existing homeowners get a monopoly on deciding what kind of city Santa Cruz should be? If there is a desire for dense housing, then dense housing will get filled. If you're right that people moving to these cities want suburbia then one would expect new multi-story apartments to go empty. But that's clearly not what happens.
RhysU 4y ago
> What’s the end-game? Step 1: Move somewhere affordable. Step 2: Spend years building an awesome community because you personally endeavor to make it what you want. Step 3: Profit. Notice this is the same process for a fixer upper house. It's just a buying into a fixer upper community. Labor intensive. Higher variability in the outcome but notice much more upside than flipping houses.

yuan43 4y ago

The recipe for what Santa Cruz is experiencing seems to be: 1. Locate the city in a geographically isolated, but beautiful area close to a major employment hub. 2. Institute strong anti-growth policies. 3. Invite a UC into town. 4. Allow the UC to expand without the matching requirement to build one market-rate housing unit per admitted student. 5. Wait a few decades. What's great about this is how everyone is trying to get something for nothing. The students are trying to get a "UC" brand without the highly-selective entry requirements of other UCs, and largely bringing in loans to pay for it. The university is growing the student population without building sufficient student housing. Property owners benefit from skyrocketing values without experiencing the pain of finding a place to live, or proportionally exploding property taxes. The city benefits from the money the students bring with them in the form of debt. I suspect this process would go into reverse rather quickly by taking a single step. Cut the federal loans program by 50%, then 10% per year for every year thereafter. For extra bang, repeal Proposition 13.

vineyardmike 4y ago
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but I don’t think you’re being very fair to students, and i don’t think this issue is particularly about the students. (and I’m not convinced Prop13 needs to be repealed to solve problems). Students and loans are a different issue and it seems cruel to label them as wannabe UC students who aren’t good enough. All UCs are respectable. I think this issue can be generalized a lot… 1. Locate a city with geographic limits. 2. Institute anti-growth policies. 3. Invite anything that may attract more people into town. 4. Allow 3 to continue/repeat without an increase in market rate housing. 5. Wait. 6. Landlords profit Prop 13 has a good goal - prevent property tax increases from displacing long term residents. If you allow growth in housing supply then this can be a good thing, but the incentives ruin it. A balanced law or requirement that requires more housing to maintain prop13 would likely solve this mismatched incentive issue (if you vote against more housing, you could experience cost increases). Maybe tack a “breakpoint” in tax stability to rent-rates-beyond-inflation stability.
- rcpt 4y ago
  Since 1977 California has had the California Tax Postponement Program to protect low income seniors from the economy. If you're a low income senior and own your house in California you can defer property taxes indefinitely so that no matter what happens to housing prices you'll never feel pressured to move. Several states have something similar (eg. NJ senior freeze) but I think California is the most aggressive. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary. It could be removed entirely overnight and grandma wouldn't need to pay a dime.

paxys 4y ago

Sad to say but the only way to get administration to take these issues seriously is to transfer out. Santa Cruz is the bottom feeder of the UC system. The only reason people take it seriously is because of the prestigious "University of California" tag. There are plenty of better schools nearby (including non-UC ones like Cal Poly and several CSUs) that are more worth your money. Or think even beyond that. I went to a top 10 school in the midwest and paid $300/mo for my own apartment. After graduating I got a job working next to people from Berkeley, MIT and Stanford with the same career trajectory as them but a tiny fraction of the debt.

llampx 4y ago
Standard reminder that institutional problems can not be fixed by individual action.

btbuilder 4y ago

Unless housing is built and controlled by UCSC the housing will be snapped up by more of the same and not change the equation that much IMO. If growth is wanted and accepted by the majority of voters (which I don’t believe it is) then a unified plan that involves significant transport investment is needed. Traffic on highway 1 in both directions or mission street are clear indications of this. I believe the university should be making sure it’s students are fully aware of the situation. Especially new foreign students who have no credit or even guarantors to fall back on for private rentals.

bombcar 4y ago
The state should sit on the UC system and forbid them to allow more students to attend than they can provide housing for.

russellbeattie 4y ago

My son just went through this and got super lucky to find a place, but out in Capitola. UCSC's campus is absolutely massive with huge areas of unused, unforested land [1]. There is more than enough space for more dorms and apartment houses as well as the accompanying utility systems needed. If they're going to continue to increase enrollment, they need to bite the bullet and put up some goddamn buildings. They simply don't want to. 1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/qocsUGwbhcZaKbdX7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/qocsUGwbhcZaKbdX7

jltsiren 4y ago
The university wants to build new student housing, but many people in the university and many locals don't. There are concrete plans to build housing for a few thousand additional students on campus, but the plans have been on hold for years as people oppose them for environmental and aesthetic reasons.
- russellbeattie 4y ago
  I think we both know how many legal and political levers can be brought to bear by large government institutions when they wish. This is a priority and the NIMBYs in this case are being absurd. In the 1950s Santa Cruz actively campaigned to have the campus there with widespread support from residents. They signed up for it and that huge chunk of land was granted with the idea of having plenty of space to have all the students on campus, and for future growth. The residents were repaid by the skyrocketing values of their homes. The current residents either grew up with that knowledge, or chose to move there despite it. The city can't just decide 60 years into its existence that they've changed their minds and want to limit the university's growth. That's what the plan was from the beginning. Anyways, when the UC finally decides it has to be done, Santa Cruz will have little power to stop them short of an outright legal war. Like I said, they simply don't want to.
- jjav 4y ago
  > The university wants to build new student housing, but many people in the university and many locals don't. UC is an independent entity from the city and they can build housing on their plentiful land whether locals like it or not. UCSC just doesn't want to solve the problem and prefers to look the other way and dump the students onto a town that has no space.

johnea 4y ago

So, I have to agree there is a major shortage of affordable housing. But, I have to disagree that this is due to a lack of building. 20 years ago, there was no housing crisis. Period. In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%? No, of course it didn't. In fact the US population is very flat in recent decades. What changed? Short term rental!!! A huge portion of the housing stock purchased, much by corporate buyers, and converted to AirBnB or VRBO. The housing crisis is 100% created by the rise of "short term rentals", a phrase that really means: "convert a significant portion of the housing stock into unlicensed hotels". People paying per night to rent houses are never going to be out-bid by people who want to rent by the month. This whole BS about "not building enough", is really "not building enough to make up for all the houses now run as hotels". There has NOT been a population boom. Ask yourself: Why were there enough houses a decade or 2 ago, but not now?

bombcar 4y ago
Population went from 289 million to 329 million. That’s not nothing.
fragmede 4y ago
> In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%? I hate to break it to you, but let's say the population grew a measly 1% per year. Thanks to the way compounding interest grows, after 20 years, that is about a 20% increase compared to 20 years ago. (1.01^20 = 1.22)
millimeterman 4y ago
While some comments have pointed out that the population has increased, that doesn't actually matter. Because what's being discussed here is an increase in demand for housing in a specific city. Even if the country's population stayed the same, an increase of people wanting to move to Santa Cruz will drive up demand for housing in Santa Cruz. When you have sustained increases in demand over multiple decades but local governments that block any and all attempts at constructing housing supply to match, you get the ballooning prices you see now. That there is plenty of housing supply in Nowheresville, Nebraska is of little use to the people who can't afford to live in Santa Cruz.